This comic is based on a common belief/superstition that when someone's eyelash falls out, that person can make a wish on it. This comic appears to be a page from the fictitious Wish Bureau in charge of granting said wishes. And of course the wisher is Black Hat and he has quite a few wishes, most of them based on the previous wish. A common trope in fiction is that wishing for more wishes is prohibited and for many of his wishes Black Hat attempts to circumvent that.

January 9

That wishing on eyelashes worked

This wish is pointless. If wishing on eyelashes worked, then this would do absolutely nothing (because it already works) and if it didn't then nothing would happen because wishing on eyelashes wouldn't work.

January 12

A pony

This wish functions as a test to see whether or not previous wish worked. It can be assumed that it did, as Black Hat then continued to make additional wishes.

January 15

Unlimited wishes

This appears to have failed, due to the typical ban of wishing for additional wishes in conventional folklore.

January 19

Revocation of rules prohibiting unlimited wishes

An attempt to circumvent the ban in the previous wish.

January 20

A finite but arbitrarily large number of wishes

Another attempt to circumvent the ban on unlimited wishes.

January 28

The power to dictate the rules governing wishes

Yet another attempt to circumvent the ban on unlimited wishes.

February 5

Unlimited eyelashes

This wish likely caused Black Hat to grow unlimited eyelashes, which could be quite inconvenient and painful. And, yes, one more attempt to circumvent the ban on unlimited wishes.

February 6

That wish-granting entities be required to interpret wishes in accordance with the intent of the wisher

This wish is likely a response to the previous day's misguided wish. It's actually quite a common problem that people making wishes leave them open for misinterpretation.

February 8

That wish-granting entities be incapable of impatience

An attempt to prevent whatever being is powerful enough to grant wishes from becoming angry with Black Hat while he tries to manipulate the system.

A power that could be interesting to have. It also very much fits with Black Hat's character.

February 19

Veto power over others' wishes and all congressional legislation

An improvement of the previous wish. This would be very interesting to have indeed, especially if you are Black Hat, because you could veto any law at any time.

February 23

The power to override any veto

This wish would allow Black Hat to override vetos which in addition to the previous wish would effectively make him control the US legislature and, to some extent, also the UN. It will also allow him to turn certain laws off (veto them) and on again (override the veto) at any moment, messing with people and legal authorities alike.

February 27

The power to see where any shortened URL goes without clicking

This wish relates to a common practice especially in tweets or other short length media where full length specific HTML addresses such as www.somewhere.com/articles/specificdate/the page.html would not be feasible. So a more compressed but nonsensical string of seemingly random characters is used which links to a link of the full text address. This creates some problems for people who are security or privacy conscious and prefer to be informed beforehand where they will be traveling on the Internet.

February 29

The power to control the direction news anchors are looking while they talk

This wish likely appeals to Black Hat's mischevious side, allowing him to cause news anchors to look at the wrong camera during live broadcast. Repeatedly switching to the incorrect camera would cause havoc in the studio.

March 7

The power to introduce arbitrary error into Nate Silver's predictions

A reference to Nate Silver, who is a former writer for Baseball Prospectus working on predicting baseball players' stats and now writes for Five Thirty Eight in which he predicts the outcome of elections based on polling data. This would grant Black Hat the power to influence the result of elections. This would tighten the Black Hat's control of the US even more.

A universe which is a replica of this one sans rules against meta-wishes

Another attempt to circumvent the rules against wishing for more wishes.

March 29

Free transportation to and from that universe

While the previous wish appears to have worked, Black Hat notes a problem with it: he is still in our universe with no ways to get to the new one.

April 2

A clear explanation of how wish rules are structured and enforced

It appears that one or both of the previous two wishes failed, so Black Hat tries to discover exactly what is offending the Bureau. Having clear rules and how they work helps anyone finding loopholes in them.

April 7

The power to banish people into the TV show they are talking about

Black hat is obviously fed up of hearing people talking about certain TV shows, and would like to be able to banish them into the show, thus prevent him having to listen to those people.

April 8

Zero wishes

An attempt to hack the wish-granting system by using a quite common vulnerability in input validation: an unexpected value. There may be multiple vectors this can work:

in many computer systems, 0 is reserved for unlimited

the number may be used as a divisor in some equation and this will make the system divide by zero and probably crash

there also may be an assertion like “number of wishes granted == 1” which would fail, again crashing the system

However it seems the eyelash wish-granting system does proper input validation on zero because it did not crash or grant unlimited wishes

April 15

Veto power over clocks

Midnight, April 15 is the deadline for filing income tax returns in the United States.

April 22

A pokéball that works on strangers' pets

A reference to the cartoon and video game series Pokémon. A Pokéball can be thrown at a Pokémon (or in this case, a pet that the Pokéball thrower finds either annoying or cute) to capture/contain it and/or achieve ownership of it. Unless cheats are used, Pokéballs cannot be used on Pokémon owned by other people in the Pokémon games. Many players wish to obtain the often high-level Pokémon of NPCs, and black hat guy may also be interested in pranking other players by stealing their powerful Pokémon

The title text is a reference to how people often want a ball to either go in or out in a sporting event they are not a part of. Normally, spectators of a game are not actually in the game, but always think that they can somehow influence the game superstitiously, such as perhaps yelling out jinx whenever the opposing team makes a shot, even though if they are watching the game from a television, that would have no effect. By wishing for power over friction, a spectator would have influence over what transpires during a sporting match. In most sporting events which involve running, a sudden drop of friction would make the runner fall over, as this would be like suddenly running out over a sheet of ice. Conversely, in ice hockey an increase in friction could make the puck stop before the goal, and also make the players fall over, as it would be like trying to skate on land.

It seems to me that February 6th's wish implies that, as a result of the previous day's wish, he now has an absurdly large number of eyelashes. Opinions? Bobidou23 (talk) 02:58, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

I thought of Black Hat having a crazy number of eyelashes, but not attached to him, so he can't pull them for a wish. They're just in a pile on the floor or something. 173.245.56.187 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I feel that each wish should be thoroughly explained, or at least briefly mentioned. 108.162.238.193 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

March 15 may reference a painting of M.C. Escher so named "House of Stairs" 199.27.128.79 08:19, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

"Revocation of rules" and especially "meta-wishes" must be references to "Typeless Wish" scene in Göedel, Escher, Bach. "banish people into the TV show they're talking about" might(?) also reference the plot there where Achiles and Tortoise enter Escher's Convex and Concave painting after discussing it. Surpsingly to me, that episode's only Escher illustrations are Concave and Convex & Reptiles; House of Stairs does not appear anywhere in the book. Cben (talk) 00:48, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Often when configuring software (especially regarding limits) 0 is taken to mean infinite, for example in a mail server's config file there may be an entry that looks like "Max number of connections: (enter 0 for unlimited)" 141.101.98.170 19:24, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

My take on "zero wishes", is that it is a bit of black hattery. He wants to abuse any system he finds, by asking for zero wishes he wants to cause the eyelash wish system to crash in some way. Its not an attempt to gain more wishes, its an attempt to bring the wish system down.141.101.98.165 21:16, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

My take on the title text was that Black Hat wanted to alter friction for his own amusement, rather than to affect the outcome of a sporting event as the current explanation seems to lean towards.--Pudder (talk) 12:32, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

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